Brazil set to test Twitter's selective blocking policy

I've been telling reporters that Twitter's new national
blocking policy was like Chekhov's
gun. Its recent appearance inevitably prefigured its future use.

High up on the list of countries that I thought might take
the first step was Brazil; it was one of the first countries to make demands on
Google for takedowns, and still remains the country with the highest number of
content takedown requests for that company. Sure enough, today, Brazil's
federal prosecutor was seeking
an injunction to prevent Twitter users from warning others of radar speed traps.

As we've explained before, Brazil's
high ranking in Google's transparency data doesn't mean that Brazil is the
most draconian censor in the world; it just means that Brazil, like many South
American countries, has a judicial system that allows individuals to demand
content takedown, and often instructs intermediaries like Google and Twitter to
comply with these orders. The prosecutor's order, if a judge agrees, will be
aimed at users, but would almost certainly be enforced via a demand on Twitter
itself.

The question
I posed last week will then come up: will simply hiding the content from
Brazilian users, post facto, be enough to satisfy the courts? Will seeing
notification of the content vanishing from their Twitter streams encourage
readers to search for it elsewhere? Will the courts pursue these traffic reports
if they move to other social media sites? News of radar traps and roadblocks
are obviously highly time-sensitive. Will the prosecutor seek to require the
courts (or Twitter) to preemptively filter future tweets on this topic?

When discussing press freedom, it might seem a stretch to seize
on the right to send bite-sized traffic reports as a bellwether. But it does
not take much to move from radar trap announcements to the reports made by
citizen journalists in Mexico, who use Twitter to notify their community of
drug cartel roadblocks and shootings. In China, allegedly false rumors spread
online have
led to arrests; in Mexico, incorrect rumors spread on Twitter have
been transformed into charges of terrorism. When simply disseminating information
becomes a criminal offense, the more dangerous it becomes to report any news.
And the more topical news is, the more tempted governments will be to press for
pre-emptive censorship, instead of slow-moving and retrospective court orders.

San Francisco-based CPJ Internet Advocacy Coordinator Danny O’Brien has worked globally as a journalist and activist covering technology and digital rights. Follow him on Twitter @danny_at_cpj.